Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
African Reverberations of
the Mumbai Attacks
Edgar Pieterse
Abstract
In the wake of Mumbai terror attacks one is forced to reflect on the nature
and representation of urban violence across the global South. It is clear that
only certain kinds of violence and upheaval warrant attention in the public
domain as reflected in the worlds globalized media. This observation
immediately forces one to consider the deafening silence about the pervasive execution and symbolic order of terror in much of Africa. Indeed, 88
percent of conflict deaths between 1990 and 2007 in Africa received hardly
any media coverage let alone analysis. Given that one is talking about 5.4
million deaths in Congo (DRC) alone, it is very difficult to fully comprehend
the differential treatment of conflict, violence and death. Drawing on the
rich perspective in postcolonial urban studies that cities can be read as
targets, I seek to extend that work by bringing routinized violence, focused
on social infrastructures and relations, into the analytical frame. Hopefully,
the Mumbai attacks can at least open up fresh and more urgent avenues of
theoretical work on the painful and extreme constitution of urban
modernities in the global South.
Key words
African urbanism
violence
everyday practices
social infrastructures
urban
Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 26(78): 289300
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409349282
curiously, hardly any account of urbanism in both the North and South is
sketched with the stink of decaying bodies and charred ruins. The paradigmatic examples they cite include the flattened fates of Hiroshima, Hanoi,
Phnom Penh, amongst other cities. For them this silence stems from an
account of Modernity that avoided the confluence of urbanism and catastrophe (Bishop and Clancey, 2003: 64). At the heart of understanding cities
as targets is a recognition that urban infrastructures and the dependencies
that they generate make for incredibly convenient and compelling targets
to achieve annihilation, destruction, sabotage, delays, inconveniences,
bottlenecks, reversals, intensified vulnerabilities and so on; opportunities
that have tended to be too good to pass up on as recent wars in the Gulf
region and Asia have demonstrated. Interestingly, contemporary cities are
not merely military targets but also economic targets because of the ways
in which cities can be rendered sites of investment repulsion on the back
of (engineered) rumours and perceptions in our electronically mediated and
financially driven globalized economy. It is this dual and intertwined vulnerability to attack and incapacitation that marks cities as global in a perverse
way according to Bishop and Clancey (2003).
It is difficult to argue with this persuasive and historically detailed
perspective, but it does raise questions if one resides in a part of the world
that is marked by the extreme absence of networked urban infrastructures
and effective insertion into the electronically mediated global economy. So,
in the interest of advancing the intellectual project of Bishop and Clancey,
I want to use this short article to draw attention to the constitutive nature
of routine violence and terror in African urbanisms to contribute to the
larger project of rethinking the city-as-target. Thus, the next section paints
a picture from different African urban contexts about the pervasive and
insidious nature of everyday violence. Thereafter I draw attention to how
African urbanists are thinking about the significance of this in terms of the
nature of the social, and by extension, the urban.
Routinized Violence and Terror
A recent report by Human Rights Watch (2007) catalogues how local politics
in Nigerian cities have become hostage to an ostensible electoral system
whereby each political party, and especially their leaders, exercise their
political agency through the brutal force of local gangs. It is estimated that
around 11,000 Nigerians lost their lives in politically related violence
between the 1999 and 2007 elections and during the same period 3 million
were displaced (Human Rights Watch, 2007: 19). Practically, local political parties and politicians who establish and sponsor gangs that intimidate,
abuse and attack political opponents and ordinary people orchestrate this
violence. The same gangs also commit electoral fraud during elections by
stealing ballot boxes or loading them with fraudulent ballot papers. The
various electoral commission reports suggest that the practice is endemic
for both federal and local elections. The Human Rights Watch report sums
it up in these terms:
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015
For most poor youth in many cities of Africa, the city is a highly
circumscribed funnel that delivers them to contexts within which they have
very little choice but to opt for a life of violence, excess and terror because
of the profound deprivation that characterizes their households and neighbourhoods, which coincides with the crumbling of earlier socialization
frameworks. Ailsa Winton (2004) reminds us that John Galtungs seminal
work on structural violence captures how deprivation is itself a form of
violence. In this reading:
understandings of violence include psychological hurt and, in turn, alienation, repression and deprivation. . . . In urban contexts, it is deprivation as
inequality that is the most important form of structural violence, and also that
which relates most significantly to the emergence of everyday reactionary
violence. Deprivation in this sense includes not only differences in income
but also the lack of access to basic social services, the lack of universal state
security protection, along with the severe corruption, inefficiency and
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015
Thus, for Jamal, the issue is not a choice between hope and despair, but
rather nurturing an epistemic capacity to engage with the indeterminate
zone of becoming that falls between these polarities. For, it:
. . . is terror that challenges all claims to the substantive at the precise
moment that it despairingly invokes the non-substantive. By insisting upon
the prevailing despair that has gripped the South African imaginary a
despair that is flanked today by an unparalleled hope I would not want to
consecrate that despair in and for itself. Rather within and between despair
and hope I would suggest that another way of living becomes possible. This
other way is only possible once one accepts that the styling of self is coterminous with the styling of terror. For it is the epistemic and psychic reconfiguration of terror that will best enable us to embrace the barbarism of the
present moment. This embrace at once intimate and violent allows for
both an implacable acceptance of a brute fate that emerges without pretext
and reason as it allows for a limited conversion and transformation. This view
lays no claim upon the future and neither does it measure itself against a
preordained past. Rather it is a view that accepts the unresolved nature of
the present moment as one that must be negatively questioned and apprehended. Only thereby will we free ourselves from the captivity of despair and
hope. (Jamal, 2009: 135)
Thus, our task in re-describing the city, in the first instance, is not to look
for an end to the horror, or to reach out for the moment of redemption; no,
our most important imperative is to simply stare terror in the face without
any anticipation that it will come to an emancipatory end. This is a tall order
but one, I agree, we cannot afford to elide, because the violence that
animates the spaces of daily survival and adaptation has a deep and expansive root network that it feeds off as the work of Mahmood Mamdani (2007)
suggests.
Mamdani provides a useful argument to explain the constitutive nature
of political violence in most parts of the African continent as religious and
ethnic identities become mobilized in a process he defines as the politicization of culture. This argument is of relevance to our concern here
because it suggests that armed conflict will remain a constitutive dimension
of contemporary political life, especially as economic growth becomes ever
more tied to extractive industries that feed the global commodities boom.
The crux of Mamdanis historically rich argument is that modern power in
contemporary Africa is almost without exception premised on a distinction
between civil and customary identities and the institutional implications
that go along with such a distinction. This premise is a direct outgrowth of
the colonial regime of governmentality, which was essentially kept in play
in the postcolonial era because the differential, customary regime which
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015
However, with the sustained economic crisis across much of Africa since
the 1970s; the systematic drift towards a narrow agenda of resource plundering by national elites, buffeted in turn by heightened geopolitical
dynamics as a function of the Cold War; the devastating effects of structural
adjustment programmes; and ever deepening economic marginalization in
a more and more integrative global economy, this nave vision for young
people turned sour. Dioufs project is to come to terms with the culturally
inflected consequences of this ruined vision. The argument he mounts, I
believe, provides us with some clues about how to fully acknowledge and
move through the prevalence of urban terror as a generative current in the
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015
Key themes that arise from the excerpt include exclusion, which
denotes the profound scale at which most African societies and cities simply
fail the majority of urban inhabitants with formal opportunities that one
comes to expect with the consolidation of modernity; yet, despite this
unimaginable scale of social failure, youth display phenomenal agency by
actively constructing their own places and social territories within which to
forge different, morally ambiguous, bases for identity construction. Furthermore, there is the evocative suggestion of alternative itineraries of bodily
and imaginary circulation, which firmly place the subjectivities of youth in
the de-territorialized domain of the translocal (Smith, 2001), a theme that
has of course been carefully mapped out in the rich and occult-realist ethnographic elaborations of de Boeck (2005) and Simone (2004, 2006). Then
there is that arresting image of postures of defiance, which intimate the
confrontational and often deliberately offensive behaviours and tactics of
youth as they put their bodies, sexual desires and offensive cultural proclivities on display, effectively daring mainstream society to respond, attempt
an intervention or even feign concern. Indeed, Diouf is probably right that
the continuously reinvented rituals of transgression are about announcing
presence and claiming symbolic space in a society and system that can do
little but announce its impotence to deliver any semblance of a viable future.
In the remainder of his article, Diouf (2003: 5) explores the new forms
of association and sociality that young people enter into as they make their
way into the worlds market economy of desire and consumption. In particular he focuses, somewhat counter-intuitively given the primary thrust of his
argument, on religious associations, sport and cultural organizations, which
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015
It is on this note that we can circle back to the broader theme of the
city-as-target. If African cities are singular in their profound lack of
networked infrastructures that engender the status of being a target, then it
is clear that the social relations that serve as compensatory infrastructures
are also targeted for routinized abuse as demonstrated in this article. In fact,
it could be argued that cities, and even mobile urban conurbations that arise
from territorially driven low-intensity conflicts, are equally targets, but in a
more insidious form because the violence spills over into daily life and
transactions and becomes dyed into the fibre of the socialities that prop up
African cities and sensibilities.
Tellingly, a similar silence about routinized daily violence marks the
public discourses that conjure Indian cities and villages. It is striking that
the Mumbai attacks attracted such pervasive coverage when the large-scale
but utterly normalized abuse of Dalits (approximately 192 million of Indias
population), tribal groups and religious minorities hardly feature in the
globalized narratives about social violence (Human Rights Watch, 2008). It
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015
confirms the basic argument of Bishop and Clancey (2003) about the pervasive proportions of the violence embedded in modernity. However, what I
have tried to do in this short intervention is to suggest that we can usefully
extend their perspective on city-as-target by highlighting how physical,
economic and social infrastructures can be read through their vulnerability
to violent attacks. In this sense, the Mumbai attacks confirm the constitutive dynamic of spectacular attacks in the making of cityness in our
mediated era, but it also reveals the deafening silence about other kinds of
normalized violence that are in fact much more extreme in scale and scope
and equally find their roots in the mangled origins and consolidations of
modernity.
References
ADB (African Development Bank) (2008) African Development Report 2008/2009:
Conflict Resolution, Peace and Reconstruction in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bishop, R. and G. Clancey (2003) The City-as-Target, or Perpetuation and Death,
in R. Bishop, J. Phillips and W.-W. Yeo (eds) Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast
Cities and Global Processes. New York: Routledge.
De Boeck, F. (2005) The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa,
African Studies Review 48(2): 1131.
De Boeck, P. and M. Plissart (2004) Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Brussels:
Ludion.
Diouf, M. (2003) Engaging Postcolonial Cultures: African Youth and Public Space,
African Studies Review 46(1): 112.
Edemariam, Y. (2007) From an Ancient Cloud: Getting by in Ethiopias Slums,
Harpers Magazine May: 6775.
Hollar, J. (2009) Congo Ignored: When 5 Million Dead Arent Worth Two Stories
a Year, South African Civil Society Information Service, URL (consulted May
2009): http://sacsis.org.za/site/srticle/284.1
Human Rights Watch (2007) Criminal Politics: Violence, Godfathers and Corruption in Nigeria (HRW vol. 19, no. 16(A)). New York: Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights Watch (2008) India, in World Report 2008: Democracy Charade
Undermines Rights. New York: Human Rights Watch.
Jamal, A. (2009) Terror and the City, in E. Pieterse and N. Edjabe (eds) African
Cities Reader: Pan-African Practices. Cape Town: Chimurenga. URL: www.african
citiesreader.org.za
Kessides, C. (2006) The Urban Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for
Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction. Washington, DC: Cities Alliance.
Mamdani, M. (2007) Political Violence and State Formation in Post-colonial
Africa, International Development Centre Working Paper Series, no. 1. Milton
Keynes: Open University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2003) Necropolitcs, Public Culture 15(1): 1140.
Moreno, E.L. and R. Warah (2006) Urban and Slum Trends in the 21st Century,
UN Chronicle Online Edition 2. URL (consulted November 2007): www.un.org/
Pubs/chronicle/2006/issue2/0206p24.htm
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on November 16, 2015